Munich (May 9-11)

So where was I...riiiight, traveling around Europe. After Bonn & visiting my relatives we hit up Munich. Paul's favourite stop of the trip I think. By this point we had successfully figured out the details of the Eurail pass and opted to head straight for Neuschwanstein as a day trip. This where Krazy King Ludwig built the castle that would later be the inspiration for the Disney castle.




Now remember, this was early May and my last stops had been Sri Lanka and Australia...so imagine the shock to my system when it started to snow. Also, this is a terrible picture.




Back in Munich there were platz(es?) as far as the eye could see. Basically these big open squares, really nice and allowed us to map the city mentally pretty well.




A running theme for our trip was playing oversized novelty chess. Well, never actually playing, but posing for pictures. Paul can thrash me at chess, although I'm intrigued by Fisher-Random chess (aka Chess960).




We hit up the Deutsches Museum, where I saw the greatest hologram ever. I never knew it was possible, but you could use a holographic pair of glasses to read an unfocused holographic book. Click the image for a link to the video which does a poor job of trying to capture that effect. Also, there was a musical instrument that played based tones on your relative position to it...the video can explain that one better.




Also seen at the museum at an exhibit about the human body (click to read it):




As we traveling along, we took shots of pictographic signs that struck us as funny. Usually we'd try and come up with an accompanying tag line to go with it. For this one, mine was along the lines of "Pink Panther Zone: Please Tiptoe." Funnily enough, I recently found a site that caters to this kind of humour. Ahh the internet...what niche doesn't exist?




Of course no trip to Munich is complete without seeing the magnificent Glockenspiel. The telltale atonal clanging is music to the ears, and the hoards of Japanese tourists can't seem to get enough. We had a handy free guide from Mike's Bike Tours, that said the Glockenspiel was crap, but you're gonna go see it anyway. Mike was really quite helpful. We visited his internet cafe and somehow got free drinks with a pub crawl tour (even though we were boarding a train for Berlin an hour later). I kinda wish we went on his bike tour instead of just exploiting his generosity.




Paul loves him the art galleries, and in Munich there were pinakotheks as far as the eye could see. I don't know what a pinakothek is, and frankly it sounds more Aztec than German, but this is a shot from inside one of 'em.

about Germany, from Canada